I was sitting at home at my computer at 2:26 Sunday afternoon when my shaygetz friend Robert (a PhD student in political philosophy) phoned, inviting me to a party with hot chicks in the South Bay.
We have to park a mile away and finally find the party at 222 Strand around 5PM. It is jam-packed. There's a $10 charge for admittance.
I see an entirely new side of Robert when he makes a beeline for the margarita wrestling. Hot chicks in flimsy see-through white T-shirts and bikini bottoms wresting in a tub of greasy margaritas.
The poster proclaims: "Tacos for Tatas. Help us fight breast cancer."
Not for me. I studied my biography of Joseph Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers.
I only went inside the party when I needed to use the bathroom. I felt claustrophobic. Yes, there were hot chicks, but it just wasn't my scene. The average age was about 28. I'm too old for this stuff.
Robert boasts about this girl Sheila who started talking to him. When she walks by, he calls out to her. She waves and trudges on. Blew him off!
When the next round of margarita wrestling starts up, I reluctantly take a look. That these were real chicks, not professionals, who were degrading themselves added an unexpected frisson to the festivities.
I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I felt rooted to the sand by the vulgar spectacle.
Robert writes Moxie:
So, you missed out on hot chicks in bikinis wrestling the fuck out of each other -- in quaint setting of an immense pool of Margarita liquid. Now, Mox, I'm intensely disappointed in you. I so deeply repined your presence. Imagine what lustre and edification you could have brought to these, such heady happenings! Undoubtedly we ought have succeeded in enlisting you to don bikini; to go at it; to go for the gold; to pop some moxie cans of female-on-female whup-ass. (A few body-dops, body slams, face-plants, ass-plants to boot as well).
No joke -- Luke can attest to the veracity of it -- I spotted an Ann Coulter look-alike. She was walking nearby on the strand. With the right proposition, I'm sure she coulda' been a contenda'. The crowd, however, wasn't pleased with Luke. As if a mad leopard, he lurches then leaps -- right into the middle of said mosh-pit -- and [verbally] ejaculates, top-o'-lungs: "Repent you heathen bastards! You feeders of the bottom!! Get behind me Satan!! You ALL -- all of you!! You are going to HELL!! REPENT!!!" Poor Luke was projectiled -- through the air -- over 100 feet out from that weltering cauldron of Dionysus (tits, ass, ass-cracks, reeling priapic Satyrs and all) like a divine, blazing comet.
.............
"I had to connect with my Neanderthal brothers," excuses Robert.
I feel disappointed that out of the hundreds of attractive young women streaming by, I did not know one. I did not recognize anybody all day. I thought I was a man about Los Angeles.
Margarita wrestling is what happens when moral norms begin to break down.
"We're reverted to a state of nature of all against all. You have unleashed amoral freedom."
"I'm concerned that the imbibing of alcohol diminishes the observance of natural law," I say.
"Public drunkenness and nudeness is a source," says Robert.
"I saw this man take his willy out and go for a leak on the beach," I say.
"Public nudity is a scourge on man's dignity," says Robert, reliving the margarita wrestling in his mind.
"I wonder if Moxie would've wanted to join in the margarita wrestling. She's often said she wanted to engage in jello wrestling with Ann Coulter."
"We're with a drunken barely-post-adolescent crowd."
"Without a liberal education in the great books," says Robert, who had exactly such but nevertheless acts like a nihilistic pig, "you end up with the victory of the gutter."
There's a fight. "You stole my pot, you bloody wanker," is Robert's explanation.
How quickly the imbibing of alcohol leads to nudity leads to pot smoking leads to fighting and moral anarchy.
"This is a journey into the heart of darkness," I conclude. "We're denying the whole idea of progress, upon which our lives have been built. Western Civilization has gained sustenance from the idea of progress for the past 500 years."
"There are no core shared moral virtues," says Robert. "Especially here."
"Margarita wrestling shows the antagonistic clash of civilization and decadence, the disastrous clash of the white man and the African, and suggests the humane values that are needed to survive this conflict.
"I am Marlowe. I represent the European conscience that you have abandoned in this Hermosa Beach moral jungle." (pg. 191)
"It represents the unleashing of the most primitive bestial passions."
"If only our visit here had been nasty, brutish and SHORT!"
"The state of nature is red in tooth and claw."
"I'm being held captive here against my will."
"In the state of nature, man is only absolutely free to defend his own life and kill his fellow man."
"And rape his fellow woman."
"The social contract has been broken," says Robert. "It is a folly to think that it is still today doable.
"We're in a precipitous decline of female beauty in the past 30 minutes. I feel demoralized and weakened."
"Our physical weakness has accompanied our moral decline."
"The woman in the cowboy hat with her nipples exposed is giving me the eye," says Robert.
"You're dreaming.
"This place has turned into Sodom and Gomorra with the setting sun. Let us retreat now and save our last vestige of human dignity."
"Flags waving and guns blazing."
8:30PM. Luke and Rob take a romantic stroll down the Strand towards dinner as the sun sets over the ocean.
After dark, Robert and I surround a white woman walking topless down the Strand. She has large drooping breasts. She's not that hot. We weren't sure if those were really her breasts hanging out. They are.
"This is normal in France and Tahiti," she says to the men.
Robert's just completed a class in Immanuel Kant and I hope that he wants to discuss the moral imperative with her that one should act in such a way that if everybody followed your example, the world would be a better place.
"If this is middle America," says Rob, "this country will not survive.
"Venereal disease is so thick down here you could cut it with a knife."
10PM. Robert's convinced a woman is staring at him. I say he's delusional.
I see the woman. It is my Jewish friend Karen. "I didn't expect to see you here," she says.
How low I have fallen from my pedestal as a moral leader.
